Wednesday, 12 August 2009

This is what I thought when I discovered the surprising connection between mite behavior and God existence. This is the story. In 2001, I published a paper with David Serrano about feather mites and bird molt. The sequence of wing molt in songbirds is very predictable; if you have a molting bird on hands you know exactly which feather will be the next to be molted. Counting mites on wing feathers of several passerines we found that mites were NOT on the following feather to fall down during molt! In other words, feather mites escape from bird molt. Since feather mites die soon out of a bird, we discussed that it seems that natural selection have favored some mite behavior that allows them to perceive the imminence of molt and stay away from dangerous next-to-be-molted feathers.

Feather mites on the wing of a White Wagtail (Motacilla alba)

One day, googling for “feather mites” I found a document titled “How Mites Know When the Feather Might Fall?”. Clearly, it was talking about our paper!!!! The document belonged to the web “Does God Exist?”, which claims to “provide thinking, seeking people with scientific evidence that God does exist and that the Bible is His Word.” Despite the authors never read our original paper but only this divulgative article published in Natural History, their paper, I should say, was a pretty detailed and well written account of our paper. However, at the end of the article, I read with wide eyes that “When God designed living things, He planned down to the shedding of feathers and for those organisms dependent on the feathers. These behaviors cannot be a product of the organism's reasoning, but they can be the result of an infinite Intelligence that planned all aspects of the organism's existence.”

At this point of the post, and given my background in ecology and evolutionary biology, you should be expecting a frontal attack to these ideas. However, religions (and particularly creationist sub-ideas) are founded on irrational faiths that mainly petrify in brains when they are still plastic enough to be hardwired with the local-religious-specific-rules of how to look reality. Therefore, any flow of rational data and ideas is out of place here. Rather, I will answer with the same level of irrationality: “When the Flying Spaghetti Monster designed living things, He planned down to the shedding of feathersand for those organisms dependent on the feathers. These behaviors cannot be a product...”.

Click on the picture to discover the amazing history of the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

God is more appealing, mystical and beautiful than data, mites and statistics (and more than the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I should confess). However, while all you need to know about God is already written (“…and that the Bible is His Word”), the beauty of nature is unfolded by science every day. In other words, science shows that the beauty of nature is infinite because each year we discover more and more hidden gems and its word is an ever-expanding volume with millions of pages. Biology is the art of uncovering these tricks of nature magic (see a related post here). This discovery journey started long ago, but from Darwin and Wallace it has taken the fast lane. Many of us see this with exciting; creationists see this as the fall of their empire, appealing to the beauty of God for their own obscure struggle for (religion) existence.

Epilogue: Many people think that God(s) are an intrinsic feature of being human because all human societies have their own God(s). This is not true at all. What is pervasive is the minority of people that for one reason or another start believing or simply create a God(s) (note that each religion has started only once because of one or few people, constituting an insignificant proportion of the whole cumulated human population). Then, brains become infected with this meme mainly during their development, creating a more or less spatially-restricted epidemic, sometimes reaching the level of memetic pandemic (see the resulting world map of religions here, and an interesting discussion by Richard Dawkins here). I was not hardwired in my childhood with any of these memes, in the same way I was not taught on the art of piano, and I ensure you that one can be fully human without believing in God (although I want to learn piano someday).

Epilogue_2: Clearly, being a creationist is not equivalent to believe in God. Believing in God is mainly a manifestation of culture (other manifestations are culinary preferences or languages). However, creationists are using God to try to stop human cultural progress (e.g. science). This is even more retrograde than the lazy but constant adaptation of the Catholic Church to the unstoppable advance of human culture. For instance, Pope Pius XII said in 1950 that the Church should not reject Darwin's "serious hypothesis" and Pope John Paul II even said that ‘natural selection’ was "more than just a hypothesis" because "It is noteworthy that the theory of evolution has progressively taken root in the minds of researchers following a series of discoveries in different disciplines." and that "The convergence, neither sought nor provoked, of results of studies undertaken independently from each other in itself constitutes a significant argument in favour of the theory."

I can only hope that in the future people will learn more from the growing understanding of the beauty of nature that science is building (and constantly self-fixing) than believing in the blind and static interpretation that creationists try to impose.

IF YOU HAVE DATA ON FEATHER MITE PREVALENCE OR INTENSITY OR WANT TO START SOME STUDY ON FEATEHR MITES, PLEASE CONTACT ME (roger.jovani [] gmail.com). I HAVE CREATED "FeatherMites", A WEB PAGE TO SHARE DATA AND START SCIENTIFIC COLLABORATIONS. CURRENTLY, WE ARE 15 MEMBERS WITH DATA ON >14,000 BIRDS AND >80 BIRD SPECIES. DO YOU WANT TO JOIN US?